‘When there’s that confrontation at the front door, it doesn’t turn out very well…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A video of a woman’s brief, profanity laced tirade at a Dallas-area Fiesta Market went viral, garnering more than 23 million views from its original Twitter source as of Tuesday afternoon.
Although the recent grocery-store exchange offered little in the way of context, the situation seemed all too familiar.
Many viewers mocked the unidentified woman as the latest “Karen,” a meme-based pop-culture term largely applied to middle-age, white females who are stereotyped as being quick to complain and demand to “speak to the manager.”
In the context of racial disputes, more recent iterations have applied the term to any beneficiaries of so-called white-privilege for insisting that others respect the same set of social mores.
The inherently sexist, ageist and even racist origins of the “Karen” pejorative have also led some to label it an offensive slur.
But offensive or not, the term is likely to see wider use as tensions simmer in the highly politicized mask debate.
Selective Memory
After weeks of shrugging off the previous virus hysteria—allowing rioters to ransack American cities with impunity, despite zero social distancing—leftist media once again to sprang into action over President Donald Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Tulsa two weekends ago.
The bad-faith policies, particularly in blue-leaning jurisdictions during the authoritarian lock-downs and subsequent riots, have now retrenched the earlier resistance from COVID-skeptical conservatives, who point out the blatant political motives.
In response, many state and local leaders have doubled down by replacing the loosely enforced quarantines with new demands for face coverings, even though the science behind them has been vastly inconsistent and contradictory.
Most are leaving it to businesses—desperate to reopen under any circumstances—to do the policing of the new policies, which has put the establishments themselves in a delicate and uncomfortable situation.
“When there’s that confrontation at the front door, it doesn’t turn out very well,” said Gary Huddleston, a grocery industry consultant and spokesperson for the Texas Retailers Association, according to Dallas–Fort Worth’s CBS 11.
Of course, some virtue-signaling establishments have relished the new decrees as an opportunity to shift the focus back on what they deemed to be right-wing social deviancy and paint themselves, once more, as the sensible and responsible guardians of public health.
Ignoring the blaring hypocrisy over the recent—and in many cases, ongoing—Black Lives Matter-led protests, some have falsely suggested that the recent spike was pure coincidence, resulting instead from a false sense of security.
“When everything reopened, I think everyone was like ‘well, coronavirus doesn’t exist anymore’ because everything’s opening, when in fact, that’s not the case,” claimed Larissa Spies, a mask-wearing customer interviewed by CBS 11.
“People just need to be smarter about what they’re doing,” she added.
But paired with lingering indignation about the riots and their deleterious cultural impact, this audaciously condescending finger-wagging may, in fact, have a lot to do with the outrage that is now boiling over onto hapless store employees.
Moreover, the role that reckless protesters played in the recent spike is but one of many problematic facts about the pandemic that the Left now seems eager dismiss.
Even greater doubts now linger as to whether the facts about the virus itself are being honestly reported.
Cherry-Picking Data
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 33 million American residents have been tested.
Of those about 10 percent come back positive—even though most tests require that a person already be demonstrating symptoms and/or have come into contact with a positive case.
While evidence suggests that the mortality rate remains largely stable, as testing continues to increase virus alarmists have, nonetheless, begun hyping a massive spike in the coronavirus case numbers.
As of June 30, the US rate of 4.87% fatalities—the ratio of confirmed deaths to confirmed cases—was slightly below the global average of 4.96.
Meanwhile, the ratio of recoveries to deaths in “closed” cases over time has steadily increased from a low of 77% recoveries in early April to 91% recoveries in late June, which may suggest that treatment methods are improving.
Yet, media reports have emphasized misleading figures, such as the overall case count, new case rate (a function of increased testing) and comparative trends in individual states.
That means that since states with massive outbreaks—including New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey—have begun to level off, dishonest news outlets are declaring them as success stories and falsely painting those that have staved off major outbreaks as the failures.
In particular, upticks in the numbers of new cases from red-leaning states that are vocally resistant to authoritarian lock-downs have garnered disproportionate coverage.
Largely ignored by the coverage is that major cities remain the virus’s biggest hotspots with only a few exceptions, such as parts of Arizona where the spread among predominantly Native American populations may suggest that underlying genetic and health issues are creating greater risk factors.
Also significant is that at third of the cases in the US with available demographic information (roughly half the total number of cases) is those of Latino and Hispanic origin, while around 20 percent are black.
The disproportionate impact on those communities—once a highly touted figure in the press amid claims that the disease itself was “racist”—have been considerably less emphasized as the new media narrative emerges.
Moreover, at least half of the total number of COVID-related deaths have come from nursing homes.
All of these factors belie the paranoid notion promulgated by the Left that it is asymptomatic, silent spreaders to blame.
In reality, the only “viral” threat from most suburban “Karens” is the one spread via social media, and the only thing leftist mask decrees help to suppress is Americans’ constitutional rights.